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Wind is Muirfield's true master in this British Open

And even if golfers learn how to tame it, there are other links challenges to blow one's game apart

Ernie Els of South Africa signs autographs on MOnday ahead of the 142nd Open Championship at Muirfield in Gullane, Scotland.

Photograph by: Andy Lyons
, Getty Images

GULLANE, East Lothian -- The west wind whips across the tops of grandstands that flank the 18th green, starching the national flags of the players who will contest this week’s 142nd Open Championship, bringing to mind that evocative line from the official club history book.

It’s the one cited in this month’s Golf Digest, about how difficult Muirfield golfers find it to play in calm conditions “for lack of something to lean against.”

Plenty of otherwise terrific professionals, aces at target golf on soft PGA Tour fairways and greens that will absorb and even reverse a spinning wedge shot, never do learn how to manage the hard-running fairways and skinny lies with minimal grass on the ancient turf beneath a ball that can travel two or three times as far with the wind as into it — and then find nothing on which to bite, once it lands.

Links golf: take it or leave it.

“It’s something you’re either going to really like or you’re ... really not going to like,” said defending Open (and Muirfield Open) champion Ernie Els, who not only won the Claret Jug a year ago at Royal Lytham & St. Annes, but prevailed in the last Open played here at the haughty home of the Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers in 2002.

“Any player is good enough. It depends on how quickly you adapt. Some guys can do it in a week.” And some take longer.

When Phil Mickelson won the Scottish Open on Sunday at hard-and-fast Castle Stuart, he all but declared it an epiphany, speaking of how long it can take, sometimes, to learn how to play links golf.

“It’s taken him 22 years, I guess,” Els said Monday, and he wasn’t joking. Mickelson played his first Open in 1991.

“He’s such a talented player with his short game, it’s amazing he hasn’t done better. But obviously getting used to the bounces, that’s the big thing. You’ve got to envision that a 3-iron could go 280 yards downwind, and into the wind it’s probably going to go 180.”

Weyburn’s Graham DeLaet, who’s from Saskatchewan where you can watch your hat blow away from home for two days, shouldn’t find a strong breeze with gusts to 45 km/h anything that unusual — it’s everything else about links golf in general, and Muirfield in particular, that takes some knowing.

The proof is in the list of Open champions Muirfield has produced: from the great British players of the early 1900s like Harry Vardon, James Braid and Ted Ray, to Walter Hagen and Henry Cotton, Gary Player and Jack Nicklaus, Lee Trevino and Tom Watson, Nick Faldo (twice) and Els. No pretenders on that roll call.

For Muirfield’s 16th hosting of the Open, 15 of its 18 holes have been gently tweaked by Martin Hawtree, the same course architect who is famously (or infamously) altering several holes at the Old Course at St. Andrews, and building Donald Trump’s controversial resort course on Scotland’s Aberdeenshire coast. So the Muirfield links will play at 7,192 yards, 158 longer than 11 years ago, when Els got up-and-down from a half-in/half-out stance in the left greenside bunker on 18 to save par and win a four-man playoff over Thomas Levet, Stuart Appleby and Steve Elkington.

But it still follows the ingenious routing done by Harry Colt in 1923: a front nine that circles clockwise around an inner back nine that runs counterclockwise, basically guaranteeing that on a given day, a player will encounter wind blowing in his face, from behind and from either side, and must execute accordingly.

That’s why it’s in almost everyone’s list of the world’s top 10 courses.

“Each and every hole is a little bit different,” Els said. “There’s left to rights, right to lefts ... it all happens out there. Every links shot that you can imagine, you’re going to play it this week.”

For the 43-year-old South African, who won two major championships fairly early in his career at the 1994 and 1997 U.S. Opens, the 2002 victory here came after many near-misses in majors, and then it took another decade to win his fourth — last year’s Open gift from Adam Scott, who blew a four-shot lead with four holes to play.

“The one at Lytham felt so special. Walking down from the 18th tee right through to the putt that went in, the hair (on his arms) was just standing up. It was the most amazing feeling I’ve ever had,” Els said.

So he savoured it just a little bit more than any of the other three, and was just a little sadder to hand the Claret Jug back to the R&A’s Peter Dawson when he rolled into Muirfield on Monday morning.

Els’s treatment of the old samovar — he’s a true world golfer, and took it around the globe to have photos taken with friends and fans — was a little gentler this time, too, and definitely not on the scale of hard living it was subjected to under its previous holder, Darren Clarke.

“No, the Jug had some time for itself,” Els said. “We left it home in Wentworth for the last two or three weeks. So it’s been cleaned and buffed and it was very, very shiny when I gave it back to Mr. Dawson.”

How much buffing?

“Not as much as in ’02. We’re getting a little older.”

But not too old, yet, unless he’s lost it all in a year.

Missing the cut at Castle Stuart on the weekend wasn’t especially upsetting, he said, because in 2002, he finished 61st at the Scottish Open the week before his win at Muirfield.

“I should have probably put money on (myself). I thought about it, especially when I was 80-to-1,” Els said. “But I’ve never, ever put a cent on myself or any other player. I just wouldn’t feel right to do that. But I know some of Ricci’s (Roberts, his caddy) friends last year got me at 80-to-1 ... and the boys hit it quite big, I know.”

Either the bookies have learned their lesson (doubtful) or The Big Easy is getting better with age, because he’s listed at 25-to-1 by Ladbrokes, which still favours Tiger Woods at 10-to-1, followed by this year’s first two major winners, Adam Scott and Justin Rose, and Mickelson, all at 20-to-1.

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